Language borrowing

Why so little Chinese in English?

ON TWITTER, a friend asked "Twenty years from now, how many Chinese words will be common parlance in English?" I replied that we've already had 35 years since Deng Xiaoping began opening China's economy, resulting in its stratospheric rise—but almost no recent Chinese borrowings in English.

Many purported experts are willing to explain China to curious (and anxious) westerners. And yet I can't think of even one Chinese word or phrase that has become "common parlance in English" recently. The only word that comes close might be guanxi, the personal connections and relationships critical to getting things done in China. Plenty of articles can be found discussing the importance of guanxi, but the word isn't "common in English" by any stretch.

Most Chinese words now part of English show, in their spelling and meaning, to have been borrowed a long time ago, often from non-Mandarin Chinese varieties like Cantonese. Kowtow, gung ho and to shanghai are now impeccably English words we use with no reference to China itself. Kung fu, tai chi, feng shui and the like are Chinese concepts and practices westerners are aware of. And of course bok choy, chow mein and others are merely Chinese foods that westerners eat; I would say we borrowed the foods, and their Chinese names merely hitched a ride into English.

Given China's rocket-ride to prominence, why so little borrowing? We import words from other languages that are hard for English-speakers to pronounce. We borrow from languages with other writing systems (Yiddish, Russian, Arabic). We borrow from culturally distant places (India, Japan). We borrow verbs (kowtow) and nouns (tsunami) and exclamations (banzai!, oy!). We borrow concrete things (sushi) and abstract ones (Schadenfreude, ennui). We borrow not only from friends, but from rivals and enemies (flak from German in the second world war, samizdat from Russian during the cold war, too many words to count from French during the long Anglo-French rivalry).

So perhaps China's rise is simply too new, and we just need another 20 years or so. We've seen a similar film before. Japan's sudden opening to the world, a world war, and then forty years of an economic boom put quite a few Japanese words and concepts into the Anglophone mind: kamikaze, futon, haiku, kabuki, origami, karaoke, tycoon, tsunami, jiu-jitsu, zen and honcho are all common English words that nowadays can be used without any reference to Japan. Add to that the more specifically Japanese phenomena well known to the English-speaking world: karate, judo, sumo,bonsai,manga, pachinko,samurai, shogun, noh and kimono, say, not to mention foods from the bland (tofu) to the potentially fatal (fugu).Of course, Japanese borrowed some of these words from Chinese, like zen (modern Mandarin chán) and tofu (dòufu). But English borrowed them from Japanese, not Chinese.

It seems likely English will borrow from Chinese, too, as trade, cultural and personal connections between China and the west grow. And perhaps there's an elusive "cool" element, a cultural cachet in the West that China has yet to attain. If China gets there one day, this would certainly boost China's linguistic exports. Whether future Chinese borrowings will be new edibles, cultural items or even philosophical terms will depend on China's development and how the West responds. In other words, we should hope Chinese terms we will adopt will be more of the guanxi than of the flak variety.

The disinclination to borrow is reciprocal: By comparison with the many thousands of English words found in Japanese, Chinese has relatively few English loan-words. Part of the problem is that it is hard to transliterate into Chinese. In the case of Japanese, it is pretty easy to predict exactly how any given English word will be rendered in Japanese script. But in Chinese, each borrowing requires an act of creativity, to decide exactly which characters to use, and it may take repeated use over time to arrive at a single agreed representation. And, once a character representation has been agreed, each speaker will pronounce it in his or her own dialect, which may have little resemblance to the original English.

Maybe lack of borrowing from Chinese to English is also partly explained by hardness. When Japanese words are spelled in roman script, it is not too hard for English speakers to get the pronunciation more or less right. But the Chinese pinyin spelling, which is pretty much obligatory at this time, has a number of unintuitive features -- how many westerners know how to pronounce "qian" "xiu" or "zhui"? -- which, combined with the loss of tones, often result in pronunciations that would be unrecognizable to a Chinese speaker. This difficulty of pronunciation could be one reason why borrowed Chinese words have been slow to catch on in English.

That is correct - what you said about Conatonese. Maybe not totally dead. More like Cajun French in Louisiana in USA. Our esteemed commenter Mad Hatter apparently mistook Cantonese for chop suey and Chinese for something he saw in a Museum case.

This article is based on the writings and research of Thorsten Pattberg and this comment should not be deleted by TE until the article makes duly reference to Pattberg.

Apart from the similar content, the first paragraph mentions a tweet which leads to a Daniel Altman who apparently posts on bigthink on the same page with Pattberg. Altman pitched Robert Lane Greene about Chinese words and global language, not revealing that he just read Pattberg, so Greene felt free to make this important topic his own, citing his friends tweet, instead of the academic and his work, as the source for this article.

Pattberg's research is well published in China Daily, Global Times, Asia Times, Japan Times, Korean Herald, Straits Times, South China Morning Post, Die Zeit (German Times), Shanghai Daily, Asia Pacific World. The list goes on. He is also a former fellow at Harvard University, Tokyo University, and Peking University. Please do not delete this comment until this issue is solved.

People have the right to report copyright violations. If coworkers of Johnson continue to delete my comments, this will rightly look as if they tried to cover up a case of plagiarism.

The earliest English uses of "tycoon" appeared shortly after Perry "opened" Japan to the West and occur in a specifically Japanese context, whether American or British. The earliest citation in the OED is the diary of Townsend Harris, the first American consul to Japan—"I am told 'Ziogoon' is not the proper appellation of their ruler, but that it is 'Tykoon'"—and by the next year (1858) the London Times was using it to refer to the Japanese Emperor, with the familiar "tycoon" spelling. By the 1860s it was already being used figuratively to refer to a powerful person. The Japanese word 大君 (like so much Japanese vocabulary) is a Sinitic loan, and there is a Chinese word 大官 "high official" that was historically romanized as "taikun" in Cantonese, but there are no indications this was the source of the English "tycoon."

I think the commentators who turn this issue into general quality of Chinese words misses an important point:
There are THOUSANDS of Chinese words that have made it to Japanese vocabulary, and even more into Korean vocabulary. So, the matter is more the issue of distance, both cultural and phonetic, between Chinese and English, rather than anything to do with Chinese itself.
Also, I am surprised that the most obvious English word of Chinese origin seems to have been overlooked: Typhoon.
It is a great pity that the Chinese word for paper, 紙, never made it to European vocabulary, instead being substituted by the local word for Papyrus.

Some months ago I read an article in TE about a famous photo journalist and it basically states that all documentary photographs are staged in that the photographer chooses what to take and what to leave out. In that sense, the Saunders pictures are doubly staged.

I am the editor-in-chief of Economist.com. I have reviewed your correspondence with R.L.G. and the articles you have written on the Chinese language, and I have concluded that your allegations of "plagiarism" and "copyright violation" have no merit. Although the articles you wrote appeared before this post did, R.L.G. was completely unaware of them when he wrote it, and I can find no example in this post of a unique thought or expression of yours as evidence to the contrary. Accordingly, I am unwilling to amend the post to refer to your work, and I politely request, once again, that you retract the accusations you have made, both on this website and elsewhere, on the basis that they are baseless and defamatory. If you leave any further comment repeating these accusations on Economist.com, it will be removed in accordance with our terms of use. I would also remind you that disguising the origin of a comment using a "sockpuppet" account is also a violation of our terms of use, and will not be tolerated either. You are of course within your rights to disagree with this post and refer to your own work when commenting on it, but I must insist that your unwarranted accusations of intellectual theft stop forthwith.

When Latin was first commonly used, most people in Europe weren't Christians. Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism are religions not language, silly one. I don't want to burst your silly little bubble of yours, but Sanskrit as well as Hindi are Indo-Aryan languages, and share the same roots as English.

The tonal BS has nothing to do with it, my dear fruit cake. Japanese is not tonal and is multisyllable, and they have alot of Chinese words. Thai is tonal, and they don't have nearly as many Chinese words as Japanese. Chinese spoken during the Han Dynasty was most likely non-tonal.

The Japanese use one character to express polysyllable words. There are some Chinese words that use one character but are polysyllable. although not as common as in Japanese.

It is very difficult to learn the spoken Cantonese Language--- even Northern Chinesde who speak Mandarin or other dialects find it difficult to master spoken Cantonese because a slight tonal difference implies different meanings

And for 50 years from 1820--- English traders were only allowed to operate from Canton --- making it difficult to incorporate Chinese words into English -- they had to communicate with Cantonese speaking Natives

Those who take up taijiquan etc also learn the Chinese names (translated into English) for different parts of the routine. If they come into contact with TCM, people learn about heating and cooling foods and acupuncture meridians.

People who read literature in translation may know about The Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Journey to the West and the names of some of the characters.

Are these language borrowings? Are we only talking about the mainstream language or the entire range?

I don't think Culture A is superior to Culture B or Culture B is superior to Culture C. Some cultures die down while others survive owing to complicated or unknown reasons.

I don't know when the English language came into use but my humble knowledge tells me that a well-organized article is written with words from Anglo-saxon origin plus words from French, Latin and Greek. Without words loaded from other lanmguages, there would be no law, economic, sociological descriptions, including cuisine and remedy in everyday life.

Maybe the list of examples should contain 人， 从， 众，木， 林， 森，and son on, which shows how Hanzi is constructed. Vitality of a language rests in its usage by the majority.Words make sense sometimes through established usage rather than pictographics, one of the six ways to compose Chinese characters.

The fact that English language outstands as more and more Americanizations or American usage becomes acceptable is proof that Queen's English has grudually given way to Yankee's English, which is smplier and eaiser for both native speakers or foreigners to learn when it comes to diction, syntax and intonation.